Tag: paisley

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A Personal Path to Paisley

Back in July, I mentioned I had my poem January & You published by Speculative Books. The launch was scheduled for Tuesday of last week in Glasgow.

I knew I wouldn’t have much time to catch the bus after the end of my shift. As such, I’d kept my phone off to avoid any distractions, only turning it back on once I was on the bus. Shortly after it pulled away, however, I received an email. It explained the launch had to be cancelled because of illness, with apologies for the short notice. There is a hope to reschedule it for later in the year.

My time on a Tuesday evening is typically ring-fenced to run a writing group, but I’d arranged with the other leader to make an exception. Had I seen this before we started moving, I might just have cut my losses on the cost of the tickets and stayed in Dundee to help out with the group. Now I was stuck on the bus for around 45 more minutes until we reached the park-and-ride in Perth, so I considered my options.

I could have stopped there and found my way back to Dundee. But some of the buses are painfully slow and infrequent, while the railway station is at the other end of Perth, so I might not have made it back before the group was over. Besides, booking at the last minute is never cheap.

Instead, since I knew the writing group was in good hands, I elected to continue to Glasgow and then on to Paisley.

I was at university there between 2002 and 2005 taking a BSc Music Technology course, long before I was interested in prose and poetry. While I’d been back several times, my most memorable visit took place in 2017 when I thought I might find some inspiration for poetry.

I did find inspiration, but not in the way I’d expected. In short, I barely recognised the place beyond the town centre and I wrote an entry about this when it happened.

Today, I would have taken the time to find the layout of the area, see where the side streets were leading and work out the most convenient way to visit other places. For example, I used to volunteer at a community radio station in the Glasgow district of Govan. I can’t understand why I always paid extra for buses when I can now look at a map and see two more direct routes covered by my travel card.

I didn’t intend for this entry to be so personal, but I also didn’t intend to visit my alma mater. If there was a silver lining, it’s that the resulting poem from 2017 was published in a collection about the town. The more I think about it, the more I’m inspired to write a sequel, so I’ll see where that takes me over the coming days.

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How I Don’t Remember It

I’ve recently joined a new poetry group. It’s so new that we don’t even have a name yet, but I’m enjoying the work of the other members.

One of them wrote about his time at Stirling University and included a photo of the place in the springtime. For the following month’s meeting, I visited Paisley, where I studied at what’s now the University of the West of Scotland. I’d paid a brief visit to the town centre in 2016, but it had been some years since I’d explored its other areas.

I’d expected some change, and I saw it particularly in the accommodation. There were new blocks of flats in a couple of spots, while one place I used to rent from the University had clearly been sold to a slum landlord – and the other might well have been going the same way.

I then walked up Neilston Road, which is one of the backbones of the town. From the moment I turned onto it, I began to wonder where I was. There were new tearooms with seats outside – even though it rained all day – but even taking them out of the equation, I didn’t even remember other landmarks.

Deutsch: Logo University of the West of Scotland
Logo of the University of the West of Scotland (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There were bends in the road I didn’t recall, buildings that must have been there a century I didn’t register, and a field with cows as you head out of town that I must have seen at some point.

At least now I had a focus for my poem. One of the prompts had been ‘A letter to…’ so my piece became A Letter to Paisley, with the first lines reading:

I saw you the other day,
I’m sorry I didn’t recognise you.

But I found the opening words to be the easy part. Sometimes I can have something I really want to say, or I theme I particularly want to explore, and I find it difficult to work out how to present it.

In the rest of the piece, I muse upon the changes that have taken place and the parts I didn’t recognise, and I ponder whether it was the excitement of moving there at age 18 that caused me not to take in the details I saw on that day. I presented the piece to the group on Thursday of last week, and they helped me to make a few changes that will probably find their way into the next draft.

Strangely enough, I gained a BSc Music Technology while I was there. I didn’t do much with the qualification as it was, but I was able to use it to gain a place on the Masters degree I completed last year.